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The prevailing definition of study.
The prevailing definition of study gives further proof of a very meager notion in regard to it. Frequently during the last few years I have obtained from students in college, as well as from teachers, brief statements of their idea of study. Fully nine out of every ten have given memorizing as its nearest synonym.
It is true that teachers now and then insist that studying should consist of thinking. They even send children to their seats with the direction to "think, think hard." But that does not usually signify much. A certain college student, when urged to spend not less than an hour and a half on each lesson, replied, "What would I do after the first twenty minutes?" His idea evidently was that he could read each lesson through and memorize its substance in that time. What more remained to be done? Very few teachers, I find, are fluent in answering his question. In practice, memorizing constitutes much the greater part of study.
The very name recitation suggests this fact. If the school periods are to be spent in reciting, or reproducing, what has been learned, the work of preparation very naturally consists in storing the memory with the facts that are to be required. Thinking periods, as a substitute name for recitation periods, suggests a radical change, both in our employment of school time and in our method of preparing lessons. We are not yet prepared for any such change of name.
The literature dealing with method of study.
Consider finally the literature treating of study. Certainly there has never been a period when there was a more general interest in education than during the last twenty years, and the progress that has been made in that time is remarkable. Our study of the social view- point, of child nature, of apperception, interest, induction, deduction, correlation, etc., has been rapidly revolutionizing the school, securing a much more sympathetic government of young people, a new curriculum, and far more effective methods of instruction. In consequence, the injuries inflicted by the school are fewer and less often fatal than formerly, while the benefits are more numerous and more vital. But, in the vast quantity of valuable educational literature that has been published, careful searching reveals only two books in English, and none in German, on the "Art of Study." Even these two are ordinary books on teaching, with an extraordinary title.